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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from house stuff works dot com
Speaker 1: where smart happens. Hi Marshall Brain with today's question. Is
Speaker 1: it possible to build a cheap, do it yourself supercharger
Speaker 1: for your car out of a leafblower? So let's start
Speaker 1: by talking about what a supercharger is. A supercharger is
Speaker 1: something you normally find on high performance street cars or
Speaker 1: race cars or something. It's basically just an air compressor,
Speaker 1: and the idea is for it to compress the air
Speaker 1: going into the engine so that the air inside the
Speaker 1: cylinder is at a higher pressure than it normally would be.
Speaker 1: And since there's more air in the cylinder, you can
Speaker 1: put more gas in the cylinder and burn it and
Speaker 1: get more power out of an engine. So, if you
Speaker 1: have a normally aspirated engine an engine without a supercharger,
Speaker 1: it can process a certain amount of gasoline and produce
Speaker 1: a certain amount of power. Because of the amount of
Speaker 1: air that gets into each cylinder. If you were to
Speaker 1: double the amount of air in each cylinder, then you
Speaker 1: can burn twice as much gas and the engine can
Speaker 1: produce in theory, twice as much power, and it can
Speaker 1: do that even though the engine really hasn't gained that
Speaker 1: much weight. You know, normally you would have to double
Speaker 1: the size of the engine to get double the power. Here,
Speaker 1: you add the supercharger, which is a fairly small piece
Speaker 1: of equipment, and you double the power of the engine.
Speaker 1: So you really increase the power to weight ratio of
Speaker 1: that engine quite a bit. Okay, so I've been interrupted
Speaker 1: here by someone in the background who's asking what the
Speaker 1: differences between a supercharger and a turbocharger. So a supercharger
Speaker 1: gets its power usually from a belt that's attached to
Speaker 1: the engine, so the engine is directly powering the air compressor.
Speaker 1: In a turbocharger, there's a turbine that's attached to the
Speaker 1: exhaust system, so the flow of exhaust gases is what
Speaker 1: provides the power for the air compressor in that case.
Speaker 1: And there are advantages and disadvantages to the two different systems.
Speaker 1: But supercharging is a very popular and common way to
Speaker 1: boost the performance of an engine by compressing the air
Speaker 1: that goes into it. So the problem with a supercharger
Speaker 1: or a turbocharger is that it's not that easy to
Speaker 1: add one on to an existing engine. They're pretty expensive,
Speaker 1: like thousands of dollars. You have to do a lot
Speaker 1: of plumbing work with the uh intake or the exhaust
Speaker 1: system or both. You have to fit it under the hood,
Speaker 1: which sometimes isn't that easy, and so on. It's a
Speaker 1: it's a big project to add a supercharger or a
Speaker 1: turbo charger to an existing engine, and it's not for
Speaker 1: the faint of heart. So the question here is could
Speaker 1: you use something that's a lot more common and a
Speaker 1: lot less expensive and a lot more readily available, like
Speaker 1: a leaf blower to accomplish the job of a supercharger
Speaker 1: and get more performance out of your engine at a
Speaker 1: low cost. And this question is prompted by the fact
Speaker 1: that a article made the rounds on the internet a
Speaker 1: couple of weeks ago where a guy had taken a
Speaker 1: corvette and he had actually put two leaf blowers on
Speaker 1: it so that he could increase the amount of air
Speaker 1: going into the engine. And this leaf blower supercharger actually
Speaker 1: did seem to work. Now it's not gonna work as
Speaker 1: well as a real supercharger because leaf blowers can only
Speaker 1: produce so much pressure. Uh you might get say one
Speaker 1: pound per square inch one p s I or maybe
Speaker 1: two p s i at the very most out of
Speaker 1: a leaf blower, and that's going to increase engine performance
Speaker 1: by say ten percent, which is nothing to sneeze at
Speaker 1: if you have a two hundred horse power engine. Now
Speaker 1: you have a two horsepower engine. But the interesting thing
Speaker 1: is that it is possible and it does actually work.
Speaker 1: You can spend you know, two hundred dollars on a
Speaker 1: leaf blower, stick it in your engine compartment, increase your
Speaker 1: performance by by ten percent. That's that's not a bad
Speaker 1: trade off. So what are the problems with this idea?
Speaker 1: One problem is that most leaf blowers are incredibly loud
Speaker 1: and noisy, and there's no easy way to solve that problem,
Speaker 1: so you'd have to live with a certain amount of
Speaker 1: noise coming from your blower. The other thing is that
Speaker 1: leaf blowers aren't necessarily made to be super reliable devices,
Speaker 1: and after you use one for a couple of hours
Speaker 1: or a couple of days, it might be that the
Speaker 1: plastic impeller explodes and shoots pieces of plastic into your
Speaker 1: air intake or something like that, but it is nonetheless
Speaker 1: an interesting kind of thought question about producing inexpensive supercharger
Speaker 1: like devices that are either electrically powered or small gas
Speaker 1: engine powered to increase the performance of your engine pretty inexpensively.
Speaker 1: So let's say you were to try this. You go out,
Speaker 1: you buy a leaf blower, You stick it in your
Speaker 1: engine compartment, and run the air outlet of the leaf
Speaker 1: blower into the air intake of your engine, and you
Speaker 1: seal it up so you get a good amount of
Speaker 1: the pressure coming out of the leaf blower going into
Speaker 1: the engine without any leaks. Is it going to actually work?
Speaker 1: And the question there comes down to the computer that's
Speaker 1: controlling your engine, the e c U or the engine
Speaker 1: control unit inside your car. There is a computer that's
Speaker 1: controlling the fuel injectors that are pumping the fuel into
Speaker 1: each of the cylinders, and that e c U can
Speaker 1: be either unsophisticated or sophisticated. A sophisticated one will look
Speaker 1: at the amount of fuel that's going in and the
Speaker 1: amount of oxygen that's coming out in the exhaust stream,
Speaker 1: and it can adjust the amount of fuel depending on
Speaker 1: the amount of air that's coming into the engine. So
Speaker 1: with a sophisticated ECU, what's gonna happen is you blow
Speaker 1: more air into the engine. The e CU detects that
Speaker 1: there's more air available, it pumps more gasoline into the
Speaker 1: cylinder to take advantage of that extra air, and presto,
Speaker 1: you get more performance out of your engine. Automatically. The
Speaker 1: e c U handles the whole thing for you. And
Speaker 1: since there's not that much boost here, you know, one
Speaker 1: or two ps i, there's not that big of a
Speaker 1: change that the e CU is having to handle. If
Speaker 1: you have a less sophisticated ECU, it's not going to
Speaker 1: do that. It doesn't have the mental capacity to look
Speaker 1: at the oxygen coming out in the exhaust stream and
Speaker 1: adjust the fuel and so on, and so you're gonna
Speaker 1: end up with no additional power, probably and possibly with
Speaker 1: a lean fuel mixture in the cylinder, which could cause
Speaker 1: the image engine damage. So you would want to check
Speaker 1: your ECU before you tried this and make sure that
Speaker 1: it's sophisticated enough to handle what you're asking it to do.
Speaker 1: If you do that, and if you take some kind
Speaker 1: of precautions, say a screen or something that's going to
Speaker 1: catch any plastic that gets blown into the engine. If
Speaker 1: the UH leafblower catastrophically fails, then if you're the experimental type,
Speaker 1: this might be a fun experiment to try, just to
Speaker 1: see what would happen. For more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics, does that how stuff works dot com
Speaker 1: and don't forget to check out the brain stuff blog
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